17 May
Researchers also determined that the cuts would provide more than $600 billion a year in health benefits in the United States.
18 species whose populations may be in trouble will get a review for threatened or endangered status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
Last month the Biden Administration announced that it would resume selling leases for new oil and gas drilling on public lands.
This decision raises significant climate change and environmental justice concerns, particularly for those disadvantaged communities who may live near future drilling sites.
Our recent study on community exposures to oil and gas production shows that historical redlining has perpetuated patterns of environmental injustice. Redlined neighborhoods have nearly twice the density of oil and gas wells than otherwise comparable neighborhoods that were not redlined.
Our findings may partially explain how it is that Black and Latinx people are more likely to live near oil and gas development infrastructure today.
In light of these findings, policymakers should consider the scientific evidence of the risks posed by oil and gas production to public health, and how historical racist policies contributed to the health disparities we see today.
Many environmental problems disproportionately faced by communities of color and the poor in the U.S. are rooted in discriminatory policies put in place generations ago by local, state, and federal governments. One such policy is known as redlining, in which the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, in trying to revive the housing market in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression, graded and mapped how risky neighborhoods were for real estate investment.
Neighborhoods comprised of largely low-income, immigrant, or Black residents were deemed “hazardous” or “definitely declining” and mapped in red (i.e., redlined), while whiter and wealthier communities were considered “best” or “still desirable.”
A 2018 study in Los Angeles found that at least some Home Owners’ Loan Corporation officials explicitly considered the racial makeup of neighborhoods and the presence of oil and gas wells when making decisions about redlining, which influenced future locations of new oil and gas development. Officials gave the highest grade to one predominantly white Los Angeles neighborhood near oil and gas wells after local leaders agreed to impose “racial restrictions in perpetuity,” to keep the neighborhood white while also stopping future oil and gas well drilling. In our recent study, we found that neighborhoods that already had wells were more likely to be redlined, and, in turn, redlined neighborhoods were more likely to have new oil and gas wells drilled after the policy went into effect.
These legacies remain imprinted on neighborhoods today. For many families who have stayed in their redlined neighborhoods for generations, significant environmental and health consequences remain. Research shows that historically redlined neighborhoods have worse air quality, a lack of greenspace, and higher heat island risks, as well as elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, asthma hospitalizations, poor birth outcomes, and other diseases.
Although redlining may not have directly caused these disparities, this discriminatory policy codified and accelerated them through disinvestment in already struggling neighborhoods, which, in turn, has shaped the present-day location of environmental hazards and associated health risks. In terms of oil and gas production, research shows that drilling and operating oil and gas wells worsens air pollution and puts residents living nearby at risk of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, depression, and poor birth outcomes, including premature birth.
In California, policymakers, affected residents, and advocates are debating how to protect communities and workers from the impacts of nearby oil and gas production operations, including limiting new drilling permits and establishing buffer zones between active wells and the places where people live, work, play, and go to school. As the state seeks to phase out oil and gas production and prohibit drilling in residential neighborhoods, policymakers should account for the ongoing adverse impact of historical redlining on the environmental quality of communities of color.
This requires that decision-makers engage fence-line communities near oil and gas production facilities to reduce exposures. It also requires expanding programs such as California’s Climate Investments, which has invested over $4.5 billion in transformative, environmental justice projects that address climate change, including renewable energy initiatives. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, modeled closely on California’s program, would require that at least 40% of federal investments in climate-change mitigation and clean energy projects benefit environmental justice communities.
The worsening climate crisis, along with strained energy supply chains due to rising global tensions amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, make clear the urgent need for the U.S. to shift away from oil and gas production and toward renewable energy sources. Equally important is that hastening this energy transition would go a long way toward advancing environmental justice for those communities who have endured the health impacts of oil and gas development for generations.
David J.X. González is a Ford Foundation and University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Rachel Morello-Frosch is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Morello-Frosch is also a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Banner photo: UCLA Law students and faculty participated in a toxic tour of Wilmington, CA, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood surrounded by the Port of Los Angeles, heavy industry, and an oil field in 2019. (Credit: Emmett Institute/flickr)
You are an engaged bunch! We asked for one gift – one "big lesson" – your mother gave you that you cherish today, and you offered up examples of grace, beauty, toughness and humor.
I'm grateful – and speechless – reading your responses. We've printed a selection, and I hope they leave you as touched and hopeful as they did me.
And for you moms out there: Enjoy your day! Your kids, it is clear, carry a little bit of you forward with them.
"My mother told me to see how a guy's father treats his mother to determine how he will treat me – 51 years happily married later I can say she was right."
– Selma's gift to Marilyn G. in San Diego
"My mother's mother raised 5 kids during the Great Depression, and she taught me to care for and reuse things rather than replace them."
– Pauline's gift to Pat H. in Royal Oak, Mich.
"There is always time to enjoy a cafecito – an espresso Cuban-style – together at least once a day with family or friends (or more in my mom's case!)"
– Elina's gift to Joseph R. in Los Angeles
"Mom kept our door open for our friends, for drop in visitors, for people who needed a place to stay in all sorts of conditions – great as a kid, with some actually weird people living there for a bit, but life-changing as an adult and in our family."
– Johanna's gift to Kirk B. in Bozeman, Mont.
"The strength of persistence I exert in my daily life as a teacher comes from the gift my mother shared with me when she raised me by herself in the 1970s."
– Elaine's gift to Nigel W. in Ashland, Ore.
"Passion for acquiring knowledge - I remember trying to match the stride of my mom, a 6' woman with an Afro (read: 1980's), while walking to the public library which was several city blocks away."
– Tyler's gift to Deva F. in San Diego
"How to endure, persevere, and thrive against the odds — when pressed, tenacity can often see you through."
– Carrie's gift to Mark B. from Washington, D.C.
"Have a really strong floodlight when sailing into a new harbor at night – that's literal but could be quite metaphorical."
– Billie's gift to Michael V.
"My mother taught me, through her regular actions, how to go out of one’s way to connect with other people — across social divides — to put others at ease and lift them up."
– Claire's gift to Chiara C. From Durango, Colo.
"Mom shared her love, knowledge and respect for the natural world resulting in four very impactful, dedicated scientists and two artists, all of whose work is intrinsically entwined in making the planet a safer, better and more connected place."
– Margaret's gift to Liza M. in Santa Fe
"She showed me racism was nonsensical and evil."
– Paul E., Stanford, Calif.
"Finding god, great spirit, love in nature"
– Eila's gift to Kirsi J. in Pittsburgh
"By recovering from Tuberculosis that almost killed her in her late teens, she taught me the value of never giving up when the going gets tough."
– Florence's gift to Tom T.
"Nature is so beautiful and amazing....everything we see around us is a gift to enjoy!"
– Conover's gift to Aileen G from Seattle
"Don't give up something you love to do just because the leader/teacher/coach/authority is a jerk."
– Peggy's gift to Sweeney W.
"She let me try anything when I was a kid, short of burning down the house, which translates into my approach to this day – and which my wife might say is embodied in the frequent statement 'Oh hell, I can build one of those but much cheaper!'"
– Mary's (aka "Big Red") gift to Ritchie B.
"I learned to cherish the pretty darn healthy, French-Canadian DNA she gave me."
– Martha's gift to Lee B.D. of Plantation, Fla.
"My mom made sure that me and my siblings had a love and appreciation for nature and being outdoors from a young age and I’m so grateful for that."
– Kelly's gift to Phoenix M. of Ramsey
Editor's prerogative: My siblings, when they found out what was afoot, piled in with their one lesson from Mom. I couldn't risk family discord by omitting them. Here's to you, Rosemary!
"The importance and JOYFUL obligation of civic duty and civic relationships - voting, donating blood, checking on elderly neighbors, addressing grocery cashiers by name."
– Rosemary's gift to Marianna F. in Durango, Colo.
"Mom instilled in me an interest in and appreciation for the foods and traditions of other cultures."
– Rosemary's gift to Kara C. in San Francisco
"If you see me coming, get out of the way: if you see me coming, MOVE!"
– Rosemary's gift to Gregory F. in Berkeley, Calif.
Photo above is my mom taking her first looks at her first grandson – my now-17-year-old son. Douglas Fischer/EHS
A grim story about human remains found in a barrel exposed by the receding shoreline of Nevada's Lake Mead caught my eye this past week.
For me, it had all the elements: I grew up in a North Jersey town known for housing a few Mafia celebs, like Willie Moretti, the real-life inspiration for The Godfather’s legbreaker, Luca Brasi.
A few miles away were the heavily-polluted Meadowlands, a once-gorgeous wetland that had become, among other things, the alleged final resting place of countless Mafia debtors, rivals, and no-account Goodfellas.
So when drought-parched Lake Mead gave up the skeletal remains of a potential Western wiseguy, I was fascinated.
Lake Mead is in desperate shape. Along with Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado River, Mead is the key to prosperity for the booming cities, suburbs and farms of the desert Southwest – Arizona, Southern California, and, of course, Las Vegas. In addition to the unfortunate guy in the barrel, decades of overuse capped off by several years of brutal, climate-driven drought has exposed an intake pipe for Southern Nevada’s 2.2 million people.
They’re running out of water. Putting megacities like Phoenix and Vegas in a desert was never a good idea. They were always destined to run out of water, some day. But the rampant growth and a years-long, killer drought have made the crisis immediate.
And with the corpse-in-a-barrel story, we have one more link between climate and popular culture: The Sopranos meets fossil fuels.
It hardly made a wave, thereby joining the long rap sheet for climate change’s impact on our culture. Mostly, it’s things we’re losing.
A California vineyard
Winecountry Media, via flickr
From Bordeaux to the Napa Valley, vineyards are in trouble. Bordeaux’s quarter million acres of vines face “a slow but simmering” climate crisis, according to Wine Enthusiast magazine. Increased temperatures, more frequent damaging storms and more can have a big impact on the sensitive grape, increasing the alcohol content in some varieties by 10% or more.
In California’s Napa Valley, frequent wildfires have scalded multi-million-dollar vintages. Other vintners who thought they were spared by the flames were felled by the smoke, which either ruined the taste of America’s priciest wines, or blackened the grapes to make the costliest raisins in history.
Insurers have also turned the screws on California wineries, either jacking up premiums, limiting coverage, or cancelling policies outright.
Phenology is the science of measuring plants’ and animals’ responses to long-term changes in weather and climate. (Note: phenologists get really upset when their work gets mixed up with that of phrenologists, the sideshow quacks who tell your fortune by reading the bumps on your head.)
As spring replaces winter each year, the time- honored work of the tree tappers yields the sweet sap of sugar maples from the northeast U.S. and Quebec. But researchers tell us two things about rising temperatures and sugar maples: The maple syrup is less sweet, and the trees’ range is slowly moving north. Someday, phenologists tell us you won’t be able to find Vermont maple syrup in Vermont.
Lobstermen hauling traps on the Maine coast
Offshore, New England lobsters could meet the same fate. Warming waters are chasing much of the food chain northward. Connecticut and Long Island lobstermen are struggling with a dwindling catch; within decades, Maine lobsters may only exist on the state’s license plates.
Summer flounder, or fluke, are a popular target for both sport and commercial fishermen. North Carolina commercial boats hold most of the permits for fluke in the $22 million industry, but they have to motor north to New Jersey to find the fish.
Northern right whales winter and calve off the Georgia and Florida coasts. They feed in summer in the Gulf of Maine. For now. The 300 or so remaining whales are what’s left after centuries of whaling. Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear risk taking more But three recent studies indicate that climate change may be a final blow. The zooplankton that are right whales’ primary food source are increasingly scarce in the whales’ northern range.
I could go on. Ocean wildlife everywhere is under threat from acidification and from the everyday torrent of microplastics. Shorter term, the energy dynamics of the Ukraine crisis have become the newest rationales for keeping the oil & gas infrastructure afloat.
But I guess that’s plenty for now.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo credit of Lake Mead: Jakob Owens/Unsplash
What's one gift you cherish from your mother? We want your story.
It's Mother's Day Sunday, and we want to hear about the one gift you've received from your mother and carry with you today.
Drop your one lesson here – make it one lesson, one sentence – and we'll share the most illuminative ones Sunday.
I'll share mine: How to cook healthy, interesting food regularly, and from scratch.
To have my children see me cook and want to help me prepare a meal and then eat robustly the results – that is a wondrous gift.
My mom, Rosemary Fischer, raised four kids on a tight budget (That's her on the left, above, with my daughter Georgi and my wife Stephanie, as Georgi models the wedding dress of my mother's grandmother).
I can count on one hand the times we ate out as a family. To improvise in the kitchen, to prepare something on the fly and with the clock ticking – that is the art and crux of cooking.
I didn't realize that's what Mom was teaching me every time she made dinner, but I see it now. And it is a wondrous gift indeed.
Share your mom's gift to you. We'd love to cherish it as well.
A H/T to Axios, which is conducting a similar poll and inspired this one.
This past week was the 36th anniversary of one of the two worst nuclear power disasters in history.
A fire in Reactor Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex kicked off a series human errors and mechanical failures leading to an explosion and a core meltdown at the site just north of Kyiv in the then-Soviet state of Ukraine in 1986.
The subsequent radiation release was detected a thousand miles downwind in Scotland. Scandinavian livestock and reindeer grazed on radioactive grass. The city of Pripyat, created to house Chernobyl’s workers and their families, became a ghost town built for 50,000.
The immediate death toll is still in dispute. The eventual toll of radiation-related deaths and illnesses is a matter of greater controversy and conjecture.
Chernobyl roared back in the news in February, as Russian troops streamed toward their unsuccessful attempt to overrun Kyiv. They passed through the so-called Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,000 square mile Dead Man’s Land of contaminated trees, plants, grass, soil, and water.
Today, 15 reactors provide electricity to Ukraine, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Russia shelled the six-reactor complex at Zaporizhzhia on March 3, striking one reactor shell but not causing a radiological risk.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine inherited the roughly 1,700 Soviet warheads stationed within the newly independent nation. All 1,700 were returned to Russia by 1994.
Let’s digress to a few U.S. nuke items. A piece of my monthly payment to Georgia Power helps atone for the travails of the only two nuclear generating stations currently under construction in the U.S.
Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle has long-planned to add two new reactors to its two existing nukes about a three-hour drive east of Atlanta. Vogtle Units 1 and 2 opened in the 1980’s. Unit 3 was intended to open in 2016, with Unit 4 a year later.
We’re still waiting, and the price tag for these two beauties has doubled from roughly $14 billion to $28 billion. And counting.
Other recent nuke projects have boiled over in South Carolina and Florida.
Remember that meme from 10 years ago? The Obama Administration had just blown a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee in the Solyndra solar fiasco. Republicans pounced, and Solyndra remained a 2012 campaign issue for Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney, who teased the incumbent: “You don't just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers."
Now, Obama’s VP is president. President Biden’s Energy Department has thrown a $6 billion lifeline to a foundering nuclear industry: Utilities whose nuke plants are facing early closure because they’re aging and priced out of the market can apply to the DOE for relief.
Counterintuitive, anyone?
The rationale, embraced by some environmentalists, is that carbon-free nuclear power can help control climate change. Many others take the environmental community’s more traditional view, that shuttered nukes, like New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, shouldn’t be on welfare with on-site nuclear waste storage. (Read Tom Henry's Saturday story on decommissioning nukes in the Great Lajkes region).
And $6 billion, of course, equals 12 Solyndras.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo credit: Vladyslav Cherkasenko/Unsplash